The Mirror

I have a mirror hanging on my bedroom wall. R doesn’t like it. He says it’s a heavy, old-fashioned thing. It is one of those mirrors that hangs from a square-linked chain; the glass is framed in wooden gold, the edges rubbed from precious metal to dull grey-bown. It belonged to my great grandmother, I inherited it when she died, so it stays.

Wherever we have lived, upon whichever wall it has hung, it has never been at the correct height. At the moment, the hanging chain is twisted into a knot; if you want to see your feet, you have to stand, on tiptoe, in the bin in order to get the angle right.

These last nine years it hasn’t mattered much. I don’t have to make a great deal of wardrobe decisions. I tend to wear the same few things, day in day out; one lot for work (mildly traditional teacher clothes, smart enough to be smart, but not so smart that you either put the kids off or annoy the boss), one lot for home (jeans). I haven’t been to a wedding for seven years. My last job interview was a good long while ago (and I wore my trusty interview outfit).

And then there is the speed at which I get up and dress these days. I look back to my teen years and wonder what it was I used to do, spending all those hours and hours getting ready. These days, with three reluctant children to winkle out of their night-time cocoons, I have been known to leave the house without properly checking whether I resembled Yummy Mummy or the Wild Woman of Borneo. The mirror hangs, silent and unloved.

Most of the time, as I charge about, rushing from one place to another, our interactions are brief; gone is the self-indulgent gaze of my younger years. Today, I am more likely to experience a sense of shock, rather than of satisfaction. Where did those grey hairs spring from? Those lines on my forehead, when did they appear? What happened to my middle when I wasn’t looking?

It’s easy, when you are the queen of the cursory glance, keen to persuade yourself, despite your years and the size of your children, of your youth and immortality, if you stand always at your best angle to the wall, shoulders back, stomach in. It’s easy to persuade yourself that you are, in fact, the filtered, airbrushed image you have on your social media feeds, even though it’s hard to dismiss that same sense of dislocation you feel when you meet someone from off the telly and find they are nothing like you imagined, when you catch sight of yourself in shop windows, a chubbier-than-she-thought-she-was, older-than-she-imagines-she-is, tired looking woman.

The thing is, though, I don’t think it’s only me. Oh, I don’t mean that the whole entire world is populated by busy women who forget to take care of themselves (although it probably is). I mean that we, culturally speaking, have forgotten what we look like.

We have forgotten that we are not, as we would like to think of ourselves, somehow superhuman. We have forgotten to look in the mirror and see who we really are, instead of how we wish to be.

I suppose if there never were a child or person with Down’s syndrome, if there never were a child or young person with extra requirements in our schools, it wouldn’t matter.